300 feet is HUGE, when every other building in the area is 30 feet tall.

 

I admit, I see WT as a TOWER several times as tall as it is wide, but that's likely just a cultural assumption. If the tallest building in Indianapolis was 10x as tall as all the rest, I'd find it impressive no matter WHAT shape it was.

 

This is a really neat thread, one of the few that can go into the most intricate details and keep me interested.

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Someone asked about the size of the Stone of Tear, and if anyone has any thoughts on it, it would be cool to read.

 

Another thought. I just finished ACoS reread. Many of the buildings in the Rahad in Ebou Dar are said to be six or more stories tall. Does anyone know how feasable this is with that level of technology? (Though, since RJ's said late-17th century tech., I suppose it might click.)

I just woke up, so perhaps it's not the best time to be posting, but much of "Old Tar Valon" also constructed by the Ogier is pretty tall. Doesn't Mat speak of bridges fifty spans or paces in the air in the Dragon Reborn?

I should find a quote.

The Dragon Reborn - The First Toss

Twilight was beginning to cover Tar Valon, but there was still enough light to grace the fantastical buildings, and the oddly shaped towers connected by high bridges spanning open air over hundred-pace drops.

...

Ogier had built the great buildings and towers of Tar Valon, but other, newer parts had grown under the hands of men. Newer meaning two thousand years in some cases. Down near South-harbor, men's hands had tried to match, if not duplicate, the fanciful Ogier work. Inns where ships' crews caroused bore enough stonework for palaces. Statues in niches and cupolas on rooftops, ornately worked cornices and intricately carved friezes, all decorated chandlers' shops and merchant houses. Bridges arched across the streets here, too, but the streets were cobblestone, not great paving blocks, and many of the bridges were wood instead of stone, sometimes as low as the second stories of the buildings they joined, and never higher than four.

So these Ogier built towers in "Old Tar Valon" reach over 300 feet high if they have bridges connecting them together at that height. That's more than half the height of the White Tower (and it's more than half the height regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with the foot = foot conversion, as 100 paces (the height of the bridges) is half of 100 spans (the height of the White Tower). Even so, the White Tower dominates even them.

As for whether 6-8 or so stories tall was feasible in 16th century tech, I can't say.

Speaking of time period, I've always wondered about the level of industry and the economy in this world. On my first read when I was much younger I kind of imagined it being an earlier setting, but these people are obviously printing books and other things. What's their textile industry like? What else?

When they say the "upper half", they may not mean exactly half. Still, that could only add on a few more floors at most. I'd be interested in seeing the quote you're referencing, not because I don't believe you, but because I'm curious as to whether more of the Tower is set-up for apartments but only the "upper half" is in use due to depleted numbers.

Assuming the Towers persist, I think Jordan intentionally avoided having ajah structures in the Black Tower. Jordan felt that a male political system would naturally tend to focus on a more direct hierarchy while the women would develop a consensus building, multi-party structure. At best we'll (continue to) see a "two-party" political structure in the Black Tower.

Perrin's arc suffered simply because of how long it was. You can really tell that Jordan intended this series to be much shorter than it was when looking at his arc. It takes him thirteen books to resolve an inner conflict that started in the first one.

I like Perrin's character. I don't hate his arc. I actually like Faile and his romance with her. But ultimately the extension of this series hurt his arc. It would have been nice if he's resolved most of his inner demons far sooner.

I just finished The Alloy of Law last night. The book was absolutely superb. I LOVED it.

Just for fun, you could also estimate the amount of interior space the White Tower would require to house the 1000 Aes Sedai it's supposed to be able to house, accommodate hallways and meeting rooms and storage rooms and the Amrylin's level. Last time I did this I came up with a figure of around 25 million cubic feet. Assuming the Tower is a square building with roughly straight up-and-down walls and accounting for the thickness of those walls as support, at 600 feet tall, each face of the White Tower would have to be around 250 feet across, or around 33 spans. It could be bigger, of course, but it can't be too much smaller and accommodate all the things it's supposed to accommodate. And I kind of like the image of a Tower that's 3 times taller than it is wide.

The Tower also has two wings, though I'm unsure how big those are. It was also meant to accommodate far more people than just 1,000. Remember, there is a lot of talk about their numbers being low, and I think Egwene was bringing that many people back to the Tower all by herself with all the recruitment being done.

@Agitel

 

Why did you respond to me with such a strong tone?! You appear very annoyed! It's a funny mistake made in almost all previous posts with the maths! I'm laughing with no malice, it's just funny is all, relax.

 

Re previous post well done for getting good maths on the go, i think you are about right.

I was just responding to what sounded like a similar tone. Again, though, there was no mistake in the math. I explained how many of your criticisms were incorrect in my post. Again, we've also already been told the height of the White Tower. It is 100 spans high. A span is 5'6" to 6'. The White Tower is about 550 to 600 feet tall.

....ie the WT is clearly taller than 600 feet. Anything less than 700 is too short unless I'm mistaken and actually this is a school for ants.

Your disregard for all the actual information given us is absolutely amazing.

Ten feet per story means an eight foot high ceiling and two feet between floors. Twelve feet would either give you two to four thick floors/ceilings, given whether or not you wanted ten or eight feet between floor and ceiling. These would be standard floors. You can obviously have some rooms, like the Hall, that takes up multiple stories, though the corridors and rooms outside of it would follow the normal story plan (in fact, I'm pretty sure the Hall has at least two floors; isn't there a balcony section where the "public" Aes Sedai may watch?) Other large halls could also take up multiple stories. That much is common sense.

Out of everything you posted, the only good thought you gave was that the Tower was largely Ogier built, so we may expect that the floor to ceiling distance is higher than eight or even ten feet. (As an aside, I feel like it was mentioned somewhere in the books that the first "so many" floors had higher ceilings than many of the upper floors specifically for Ogier, but I'm too lazy to search the text for that. It's important to note that, while the Tower was built with the help of Ogier masons, it was built for humans, so the whole structure might not be made to accommodate Ogier). Let's assume for a moment that the whole structure WAS built to accommodate them. I'd say ceilings would have to be at least twelve feet in height, and then you'd need a few feet for floors. It would be forty stories at 15 feet per story, and 43 (with a little rounding) at 14 feet per story.

BelRobin has stated that Egwene was fighting on the 43rd floor of the Tower in Towers of Midnight, and I don't believe it was supposed to be the top floor, either, so we can rule out the "Ogier height" stories for the whole Tower. However, you could fit four or five stories at "Ogier height" and come out to 48-49 stories. We could also assume that 100 spans wasn't entirely exact. Bring it up to 102 spans and you could still fit 50 stories at twelve feet per story except for the bottom few. Or we could assume some stories are only ten feet in height with eight foot ceilings (again, excluding large halls and such) which is also very common.

So whatever. The Tower is about 600 feet high. We've been told 100 spans. That translates to 600 feet if we convert under the idea that 1 foot = 1 foot (which I believe is more accurate), or we can take RJ's description of the size of a march as exact (I take it to be an estimation) and assume the Tower to be closer to 550 feet (under the "march" conversion there's about 11 of our inches to a Randland foot), maybe a little over if we give or take a few spans.

I still stand by my 600 foot estimate for the total height of the Tower, and I like the suggestion from earlier that there's twelve feet per story. That would make the Tower a nice even fifty stories high.

Nothing concrete, but it has a certain "correctness" to it, in my opinion.

We keep bringing up the topless towers as if that's the next tallest. But didn't Noal say (somewhere in KoD) that the 7 towers of Malkier were taller than the topless towers (which, btw, sounds like an establishment that could be found in Vegas)? Mat thinks Noal tends to exaggerate, but that's probably just because he's seen so many strange things.

 

I brought up the "topless towers" because in FoH when (i forget whose PoV it is) is describing them as "impossibly tall"

You have to keep the setting (time period and technology) in mind when you read those descriptions, though.

Also, in the 10 inches per foot, three feet per pace, two paces per span thing, what is the unit that matches up to our modern units of the same name? This topic used the inch, but for some reason I'm thinking it's the foot. Mat's described as being two inches under six feet, or maybe it was Perrin as being two inches over. If the inch was the common standard, then Mat would be four feet and ten inches tall in the real world, and Perrin would be five feet and two inches tall. That would mean that me, as short as I am (5'5" or 65 inches) would be three inches taller than Perrin and the same height as Rand. I don't think so.

That just doesn't seem right to me.

So, treating the foot as the common standard between our two measuring systems, the White Tower would be about six hundred feet tall.

Also, a lot of credit is being given to the use of the One Power in the construction, but we're leaving out Ogier masonry, which likely surpasses real world masonry skills.

Rand was eccentric due to the madness etting in, the Two River's culture emphasized protecting women, and more importantly it was largely due to the guilt of having killed Ilyena that caused the worst of it.r

Knife of Dreams picks up the pace again. It's no Eye of the World, mind you, but compared to books 8-10, it's a hell of a lot faster and it finally ties up a lot of running plots.

TGS and ToM are both fast paced novels, though. Well, TGS starts somewhat slow (though fast compared to 8-10), but it picks up a lot of momentum.

You're almost through with the uphill stretch of the series. Ever climb a mountain and keep getting fooled by false summits? CoT is the last of those false summits, you hit the peak in KoD, and it's a downhill roller coaster the rest of the way.

Both Pertan and Phelix gave the two most common theories. I agree with Phelix' assessment, but Pertan's is also potentially valid. We don't know yet.

Well, we're an Age on the Wheel in the WoTverse, I wouldn't necessarily say first. Maybe that or the one before.

Anyway, I always just saw the ability to channel die out. Most of the world can't channel anyway. Or perhaps the ability just disappeared in the turning of an Age, like other Talents that seem to come when they're needed and then disappear. But the idea of making the Earth a giant stedding is interesting. Perhaps whatever created the stedding effect faded over time, or was destroyed in some great conflict.

I'm not sure if she's the hottest, but I'd probably be a sucker for Egwene.

I thought it was mentioned in thought at one point in a later book. Anyway, I think Jordan had planned on the series not lasting as long at the time, and thus had Rand a bit further down the road of madness, which he later had to pull him back from.

Perhaps part of it was just a feralness that came out of traveling alone in unfamiliar wilderness.

As for the Targaryens, I can't speak for all of them, but Dany's got platinum blonde hair, really fair platinum blonde hair. I'll give up the violet eyes, but the hair color, for Dany, at least, is possible.

As for Faile, I always imagine here as more Armenian, or at least featuring certain characteristics often found in easern Europe.

Did you feel that was implied in the books at the time?

No, but it is a possibility. Otherwise, Elaida doesn't seem to make friends easily, her relationship with Moiraine and Siuan up to that point was probably a little odd, maybe she felt some kind of kinship for them, or she wanted to be able to point to their fast progress and be able to claim some of their success.

Mat has felt the 'pull' of ta'veren to Rand. He comments on it a lot in Fires of Heaven. Perhaps in The Shadow Rising, too.

I think the White Tower was meant to evoke the idea of the ivory tower. Most Aes Sedai stay locked up in it and rarely come out into the world anyway.

I prefer a Buddhist parallel.  Both concepts The Wheel of Time and, Samsara (the Cycle of Rebirth) share similar themes.  They are cyclical with death and rebirth a constant natural happenstance.  The difference is that Buddhists seek to escape Samsara and attain Nirvana, or loosening.  The Pattern seems to have no real end.

 

I think christian comparisons don't work at all, as Christianity is very linear.

I'm typing from my phone, so please forgive typing mistakes.

Now, I think this goes too far. Many of the names of the Forsaken come from the Abrahamic religions, particularly the demons. I thinkthe idea in WOT lore is that myths and legends worldwide are all connected, the stories have just evolved differently in different parts of the world. Certainly Jordan has taken heavy influence from eastern mythologies, but western myths are also reflected, Abrahamic and pagan. Parallels to Jesus are not so relevant to this story, but the whole war between light and darkness certainly does.

Getting into much of this tends to take a turn for the speculative, but like Luckers, I don't believe in the Jesus/Rand parallels, as in, that they're intended to be based on the same Hero's soul in WOT lore. Perhaps if we go back a bit further in Abrahamic religions, we could make parallels to Michael the Archangel, or at least the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.

By the way the Wheel of Time works it is consistent that we are the First Age of the wheel. People who can channel gained the ability from Tamyrlin who was the first channeler given his power by the Creator. That means that they have to lose their ability to channel before they can get it back.

 

Losing it signals the end of the 7th Age and them getting it back signals the end of the First Age.

Well, aside from this not being what was meant by internally consistent, where do you come up with them losing it at the end of the Seventh Age?

If it indeed is our world/planet that is supposed to be the First Age and it has been ages before us, shouldn't there be some traces we would've found with the technology we have? Especially since we can actually date the age of our planet.

 

It's a work of fiction, supposedly with some direct connections to this time/reality. That's why there are inconsistencies.

 

Um, I have to agree, the Wheel of Time is fiction. We wouldn't be able to find relics of a past age, because, uhm, they don't exist. I'm pretty sure RJ didn't have access to some secret fountain of knowledge.

 

 

..... ?

I'd like to expand on this. Within the context of the way the WoTverse works, that is, that our legends are inspired by events of past Ages and their legends may be somewhat inspired by ours, we can infer why this may be. All around the world, in many different cultures, there is a legend of a Great Flood (or floods). Could this have been the ending of an Age? Was it a real flood? Or is that just how the 'real' events got interpreted? Could whatever inspired this story have wiped away much of the remnants of previous Ages? We can't be sure every Age needs to end with a massive catastrophic event, or a geological one, but perhaps this was how a previous Age ended. What about the Tower of Babel? Everyone in Randland speaks a similar language, but perhaps that story hints about another catastrophe that destroys much of humanity and leaves them scattered to develop separate languages. I don't know. Not everything needs to be the ending of an Age, and more stories outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition are also supposed to be remnants of Ages, but I'm not sure what they contain.

As for how this Age ends, well, maybe the Large Hadron Collider will rip a hole in the Pattern and release the Dark One! Or maybe it's a nuclear war between America and Russia (Merk and Mosc), or maybe that just happened during the Age but didn't end it. But maybe the newly found One Power was used to cleanse the radiation. Maybe the game of sha'rah represents this war between the USA and Russia and a struggle to control the Dragon? Or maybe it references a battle with the Shadow? I mean, sha'rah would most likely have to be based on something that happened between our Age and the Age of Legends, given that we know nothing of it and the game seems to talk of this struggle and point towards the emergence of the Dragon.

*shrugs*

You never know!

If it indeed is our world/planet that is supposed to be the First Age and it has been ages before us, shouldn't there be some traces we would've found with the technology we have? Especially since we can actually date the age of our planet.

 

Does this mean that at the initiation of every new Age there undergoes some major changes on universal level? An actual reforming of (at least) our planet, making it a clean slate? And I'm referring to changes coming from the Wheel and/or Creator itself. Not like during the Breaking where mankind did all the job.

 

This also makes me wonder why people in the Third (and presumably also the Second) Age has access to artefacts like the Mercedes Benz logo. Is there some major "reset" every whole turn between the Seventh and First age (explaining the lack of any traces in our time)?

I don't believe every Age undergoes a geological shift. I believe the Second Age was pretty similar to our own. I've nothing to go over other than looking at the geography, though. Shayol Ghul being an island in an idyllic sea could match an island above Russia, while Shomelle (where Asmodean lived when young)would lie on either the Caspian or Aral Sea, which also fits his description. As for Comelle, which lies west of the newly formed coast, it would fit perfectly in either Portugal or Morocco.

I don't believe there's a major reset, either. Within Jordan's universe, our legends and myths would be based on the events of previous ages. For example, Norse mythology would match in some ways with some events in the Third Age, particularly the characters of Rand, Mat and Perrin. The same could be said of most mythologies. Legends of Ogres, Trolls, Orcs, and elfs would come from Ogier, Trollocs, and Aelfinn/Eelfinn. Not to offend anybody, but I'm guessing Judeo-Christian stories such as the Tower of Babel and such would supposedly come from previous Ages. I suspect that the snake in the Garden of Eden would, within Jordan's universe, have some 'historical' connection to the Aelfinn (the Snake people who answer three questions (give knowledge, ahem) truthfully). Within the universe, I think you have to suspend some scientific knowledge about the history of the world. I don't think you're supposed to be reading it with that entirely in mind,  or at least, not with what we currently understand about the science.